Software | Information | Community

August 2010

Software

New Version of My Free GUI for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier – Jorge Ramon shares the latest version of his GUI wrapper for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier which helps you to produce the smallest most optimal version of your JavaScript code without having to use the command line providing a simple UI to configure and perform the minification.

I find you "Ultra!" – Ultra Find VS2010 Add-in (Think "Find in Files++") – Greg Duncan highlights Ultra Find, a Visual Studio extension, available on the Visual Studio Gallery, which provides powerful search capabilities as a replacement for the standard find in files functionality, offering searches for classes and methods, exclude file patterns, and much more.

posh-git Release v0.2 – Keith Dahlby announces the release of posh-git v0.2, a set of scripts which provide integration of git into the PowerShell environment

CSLA 4 version 4.0.1 released – Rockford Lhotka announces version 4.0.1 of his CSLA application framework which is a bugfix release which addresses a number of issues in the 4.0 release

Managing business object locks on application level – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at building a solution for locking business objects on a single server at the application level, allowing your application to safely work with a particular object while preventing other threads from accessing that object. Full code is provided for download.

Implementation of an Observer – Abhishek Sur looks at implementing the Observer pattern to provide a way of implementing notifications, exploring the origins of the Observer and some of the theory behind them, along with sample code showing the implementation.

The Task Parallel Library Series – The Task Class – Steve Strong continues his series of posts on the Task Parallel Library introduced in .NET 4 with a look at how the Task class makes it very easy to implement parallelized work with the ability to know when the parallel work is completed.

Crack .Net Applications 101 – Part 1 – Mark Pearl takes an introductory look at disassembly of .NET executables using Reflector and Reflexil, and how these tools make it quite easy to view and alter the contents of .NET assemblies.

Overview of Data Validation in LightSwitch Applications – Prem Ramanathan takes a look at the validation support provided in Visual Studio LightSwitch which allow you to add data integrity rules to your application with little effort, exploring a variety of different validations in a sample application.

More on SVG – Jennifer Yu of the Internet Explorer Team talks about the importance of SVG for the modern web, HTML5 and the hardware accelerated support for it in Internet Explorer 9

Testing Rx – Jeffrey van Gogh highlights a Channel 9 video in which he discusses the new testing functionality which is now a part of the Reactive Extensions

Demonstrating CLR Side-by-Side Execution – Sasha Goldshtein shares a sample which illustrates the ability to run .NET 2.0 and .NET 4 side by side in the same process by having two COM libraries written in managed code each targeting different versions of the framework, and loading them both in a C++ application.

I am an Exception Extremist – John Sonmez talks about his dislike of throwing exceptions, discussing some defensive programming techniques we can use in preference to throwing exceptions, and sharing some best practices for web we really have to throw exceptions.

The Programmer’s Body – Scott Hanselman reminds us not to take our bodies for granted and to look after ourselves as our profession as programmers does tend to keep us trapped (hunched) behind a desk, and how that can have serious knock on effects on our health.

Community

Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus on 29 September 2010 – The European Virtual Alt.NET group have a presentation from Andreas Öhlund on the evening of Wednesday 29th September 2010, starting at 7:00 GMT (8pm UK). In the presentation Andreas will be giving a hands on introduction to NServiceBus, showing how to get started developing with the project.

Monday is a public holiday here in the UK (the last one before Christmas Day – a depressing thought), and as is the Morning Brew tradition I shall be taking the day off so there will be no edition of The Morning Brew on Monday. Normal posting will resume on Tuesday. Have a good (long) weekend everyone.

Software

SigParse uploaded to MSDN Code Gallery – David Broman highlights the release of SigParse on the MSDN Code Gallery. SigParse is a code sample written by Rico Mariani which takes the method signatures in CLR metadata and parses out information about their components. This code is now licensed as MS-PL.

Information

Must I release everything when using Windsor? – Krzysztof Kozmic continues his series of posts looking at the lifecycle of components in the Windsor Container, looking in detail at the process for releasing components once you have finished with them, and looks at how Windsor makes it easier by doing most of the work for you.

Intro to RX – Scott Weinstein highlights a series of 7 posts from Lee Campbell looking at the Reactive Extensions for .NET, exploring the key concepts of Observables, subscribing, combining, flow control, and types of observables.

C#/.NET Five Little Wonders That Make Code Better (1 of 3) – James Michael Hare starts a mini-series of three posts each consisting of 5 C# / .NET features which can make you code much better. This first part explores Null Coalescing, Auto Properties, ‘as’ casting, the Stopwatch and TimeSpan Factory methods.

PSSCor2: GC Heap Analysis Commands – Sasha Goldshtein continues exploring the PSSCor2 debugger extension showing some of the improvements it offers to the commands for exploring the managed heap

Coding: Mutating parameters – Mark Needham discusses a long held coding practice of not mutating or changing values passed as function parameters in functions, looking at the origins of the practice, and looking at some cases where its not been followed, questioning if it really is that important a principle

Writing Files from Low-Integrity Processes – Eric Lawrence looks at the ability to write files in processes started in Low Integrity mode, discussing the origins and uses of low and medium integrity processes using Internet Explorer as an example. Eric shares a solution to allow your low integrity processes to write to locations that aren’t normally allowed by creating the file initially as medium integrity and marking it to be allowed to be access from low integrity processes.

Release Management White Paper and Assessment – Jez Humble shares a white paper “Agile Release Management: Towards Frequent, Low-Risk Releases” and multichoice assessment looking at the release management process based in part on the content of his book ‘Continuous Delivery’

The Anatomy of a LightSwitch Application Part 3 – the Logic Tier – The LightSwitch team continue their series on the architecture behind LightSwitch applications, looking at the ‘logic’ tier which acts as the gateway to the data storage, including concepts such as Transactions, data providers, Data services, queries, etc.

TekPub Content is FREE this Friday! – Darcy_Lussier highlights a special 1 day offer of free content on TekPub in celebration of James Avery’s birthday. TekPub is a great resource of detailed screen casts and tutorials created by well known and respected developers covering a wide variety of tech concepts, and this is a great opportunity to check it out.

We’re Not Paid To Write Code – Phil Haack discusses what our primary goal as software developers is, and that its not writing code, its delivering solutions which provide customers with value

Update: Looks like I forgot to assign the Tags/Categories to this post, so some of you may have missed out on it. I’ve added them now – thanks to Dan Puzey for spotting it

Software

Microsoft Project Code-Named ‘Houston’¯ CTP 1 (August 2010 Update) – The SQL Azure team announce the August 2010 CTP release of ‘Houston’ their light weight database management tool for SQL Azure. This CTP update features improved navigation and search, better visibility of database statistics, table, view and stored procedure designers. This preview version has also been deployed to all datacenters allowing you to experience better performance by using an instance local to your database.

Information

Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Buffering – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts exploring the Reactive Extension for JavaScript with a look at the various techniques the framework provides for collecting values from observables and buffering them into an array which is then returned to your code.

LightSwitch & Source Control & LightSwitch on the wire – Ayende rounds up this series of posts sharing his initial impressions of Visual Studio LightSwitch with a look at how LightSwitch’s generated code will work in Version Control system environments, and finds that if you include images in your data (and those images are large) then you are in for a wait while the LightSwitch screens download.

Experiments with WindowChrome – ‘ jwalk’ explores the WindowChrome WPF class included in the WPF Shell Integration Library which shipped as a part of the WPF Microsoft Ribbon Control, looking at some of the additional window styling that this class enables.

Software

WikiPlex 1.4 Released – Matt Hawley announces the release of WikiPlex 1.4, the wiki engine behind the CodePlex wiki. This release consists of a .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 release, with the sample website implemented in ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight 4 support by default, ability to include Vimeo videos and a number of other bugfixes.

Information

An effective testing strategy – Jimmy Bogard shares some details of how a recent project he worked on structured their automated testing to minimise the requirement for manual QA team testing of the application, discussing the break down of types of tests they had, the quantities of tests of each type, and some other testing and development practices relating to large projects

Quality Assurance – Jeffrey Palermo, Blake Caraway and Eric Hexter of HeadSpring discuss how they handle Quality Assurance, discussing the importance of having responsibility for quality in every team member, how you don’t need testers to have quality assurance, and also the importance of Full System Tests.

Upgrading to Windsor 2.5 (Northwind) – Krzysztof Kozmic shows the process of upgrading an existing code base to use the latest Castle Windsor 2.5 release, illustrating by upgrading the Sharp Architecture project explaining the steps along the way

Search and Navigation Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio – Scott Guthrie continues his series exploring the featues of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with his 27 instalment. In this post Scott explores some of the less known Visual Studio search features such as incremental search, Find Usage, Navigate Backwards / Forward and many more.

iPhone to Windows Phone 7 Tutorial – #0 – Jesse Liberty begins a new series of posts looking at providing you with the basic information to be a Windows Phone 7 Developer, approaching it from the point of view of a developer who has worked with iPhone development. This introductory post sets the scene, and introduces some of the key concepts.

Learning F# for C# developers – Bill Morrissey starts a series lookin at F# from the point of view of a C# developer, and in this first post looks at a hello world example, and starts to explore types, whitespace and comments

PSSCor2: Object Inspection Commands, Part 2 – Sasha Goldshtein continues with his look at thePSSCor2 debugging extension looking in this part at some of the commands and output relating to exploring objects which live on the heap.

"Getting Started with UML" DZone Refcard – Greg Duncan highlights the latest RefCard quick reference card from DZone. This card, created by James Sugrue provides a 6 page overview to the key concepts of UML.

Community

Irish Open Spaces Coding Day III – Saturday 11th September sees the 3rd Irish Open Spaces Coding Day, being held in Enterprise Ireland’s offices in Dublin. The main focus of the event is .NET development, although other technologies are welcome to join in, and the day consists of getting into groups various interest based and writing some code collaboratively – a great opportunity to work with a range of developers and learn lots.

Software

SQLCop update Version 1.1 – George Mastros highlights an update to the SQLCop project, an FxCop like tool for your SQL Server database, which will inspect and report on possible problems. This version includes a number of bugfixes to improve the experience (especially in use in partially connected environments)

PSSCor2: Object Inspection Commands, Part 1 – Sasha Goldshtein begins a series of posts looking at the PSSCor2 debugging extensions released by Microsoft a while back, and providing a number of useful additions to the core SOS debugger

Database assisted denormalization – Ayende explores some possibiliies for denormalisation of data in a relational database using features of the SQL Server engine, looking at a variety of ways of solving the blog post and Number of posts problem examining the performance of the queries used. Interesting discussion breaking out in the comments.

The ThreadPool is dead – Josh Twist looks at the improvements offered by the Task Parallel Library over the Threadpool in .NET 4, suggesting that TPL is the way to go for parallel code in .NET 4

IObserver and IObservable – A New addition to BCL – Abhishek Sur looks at the IObserver and IObservable interfaces that are now a part of the .NET Base Class Library, looking at how they can be derived from the duality with IEnumerable / IEnumerator and illustrating their use with a simple example

Capturing Page Load Times – FiddlerScript to the Rescue – Robert Bogue looks at a use of the scripting capabilities included in the Fiddler HTTP diagnostic Proxy, showing how you can use it to capture the load time of all your pages in your application and log them to a file.

Software

Castle Windsor (incl. Core with DynamicProxy and Dictionary Adapter) v2.5 final is out – Krzysztof Kozmic announces the official final release of Castle Windsor v2.5. This release targets .NET 3.5 (SP1), .NET 4, .NET 4 Client Profile, and Silverlight 3 & 4. This release sees some minor improvements over the beta 2 release of a month ago and there is one sample application (a Silverlight 4 app) which illustrates some of the new versions features

Getting Started with PowerConsole – Bil Simser takes a look at PowerConsole, a Visual Studio 2010 add-on available from the Extension Manager which brings PowerShell right into the Visual Studio Environment, allowing you to explore, manipulate, and query the IDE environment from a command line.

Information

.NET Micro Framework – More blinking LEDs – Szymon Kobalczyk takes a look at the new .NET Micro Framework development board called ‘Netduino’, a board which is pin compatible with the very popular Arduino boards. Szymon discusses the hardware, and then shares a couple of simple projects for working with LED segment displays, complete with the code to run it.

Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 5 – IResult and Coroutines – Rob Eisenberg continues his series exploring the features of his Caliburn Micro Framework taking a look at its support for Coroutines allowing you to execute part of a routine, pause, go do something else and return to where you left off.

Bending Time with the Reactive Extensions – Scott Weinstein looks at the support for custom schedulers in the Reactive Extensions allowing you to test time dependent reactive code without having to wait for the time to elapse.

Using Different Resources for Windows Phone 7 Themes – Ivan Suhinin looks at serving different resource content to your Windows Phone 7 application dependent on the theme the user of the phone has the device set to, building on some earlier work from Derik Whittaker.

Storing and playing media on Windows Phone 7 – Tim Heuer looks at implementing a download of a audio file, storing it for later playback on the Windows Phone 7. This post walks through the simple sample application, and full code is available to download.

MSR Rex – Christian Bitter takes a brief look at the Microsoft Research project Rex, a tool to explore regular expressions. Christain looks at a sample of its use where it can generate sample data for a given regular expressions

Anatomy of the T4 Text Template – Doug Holland gives a simple guide to the way that T4 templates are constructed, showing how easily you can create templated code using the T4 system.

Roll your own mocks with RealProxy – Derek Fowler takes a look at using the RealProxy class from the .Net Remoting part of the framework to construct his own simple mocking framework. Full source is available on GitHub

Software

S#arp Architecture 1.6 Released! – Billy McCafferty – Devlicio.us – Just the Tasty Bits – Billy McCafferty highlights the release of S#arp Architecture 1.6, the project which is now under the stewardship of Alec Whittington in this release sees the introduction of FluentNHibernate 1.1, caching of NHibernate Configuration and improvements to client side validation for CRUD forms. This version is also the last to support Visual Studio 2008 / .NET 3.5 with the team’s nev release being 2.0 targeting VS2010

Information

RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0 – Rick Strahl talks about a change made in ASP.NET 4 to how the Request Validation works, with a new attribute required in the web config to maintain backward compatibility with how it behaved in previous versions

How to switch between HTTP and HTTPS in ASP.NET MVC2 – Jeff Widmer looks at how you can make ASP.NET MVC 2 switch to HTTPS for pages where you require security, and looks at the more difficult aspect of switching back to the non-secure side after that work has been completed

Must Windsor track my components? – Krzysztof Kozmic talks about the lifecycle management of of components created by the Windsor container, and looks at why you would want the container to manage this, illustrating with a discussion of the Unit Of Work in a Web Application

Introducing the new Silverlight 4 themes – Tsitsi Gora highlights the new themes for Silverlight 4, Cosmopolitan (code name Metro), AccentColor and Windows7 (OS compatible theme) which provide a nice way of making sure your applications UI is consistent.

Dynamic LINQ Part 2 (Evolution) – David Fowler continues his exploration of merging the .NET 4 Dynamic functionality with LINQ to provide a means of creating LINQ queries for existing providers based on dynamic input, sharing a partial implementation as a library you can use.

Community

MonoTouch and MonoDroid! – The Manchester NxtGen User group have Chris Hardy visiting them on Wednesday 15th September to talk about the use of MonoTouch and MonoDroid to build mobile applications for Android and IPhone/iPad

Windows 7 WPF MultiTouch Story – NxtGen Cambridge continue the touch related theme with an event on Tuesday 21st September featuring Guy Smith-Ferrier talking about multitouch development in WPF

Sync Framework 2.1 Available for Download – The latest release of the Sync Framework brings with it all the good stuff from the v2.0 release, supplementing this with support for synchronisation to SQL Azure, along with support for the SQL 2008 (and SQL Azure) table valued parameter, and much more

Information

The First Hour With Lightswitch -BETA- – Michael Washington gives a run through of what he managed to achieve in LightSwitch in the first hour from running the installer to creating a simple application.

Debugging Tips with Visual Studio 2010 – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with this post looking at the debugging experience, recapping a few old features along with some of the new

Learn Windows Phone 7 with the "Jump Start" Course – Joey deVilla highlights the release of 10 hours of video of training for Windows Phone 7 Development from Andy Wigley and Rob Miles. These videos look at the development of applications for the phone in both Silverlight and XNA, looking at the whole process from ‘File> New Project’ to marketing on the Market Place.

Reactive Extensions for .NET ( "stuff happens" ) – Mike Taulty explores the Reactive Extensions for .NET, highlighting a number of great resources for getting up to speed on Rx, along with exploring some code examples of some of the features of Rx

Clay: malleable C# dynamic objects – part 2 – Bertrand Le Roy looks at the use of the Clay dynamic object library and how it answers his requirements outlined in the first part of this series on dynamic objects for View Models in Orchard.

The New Brighton ALT.NET Wiki – Mike Hadlow announces the creation of the Brighton ALT.NET Wiki, the home for information about the Group and its regular meetings.

Early Bird is Open for the Patterns and Practices Symposium – John Papa highlights the opening of the Early Bird registrations for the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Symposium to be held in Redmond on the 18-22 October 2010. With a number of great looking sessions planned across a variety of technologies this $699 early bird offer looks like an excelent deal.

WPUG.NET: Second Meeting – register now! – The Windows Phone User Group will be holding their second meeting on Wednesday 25th August at the Theodore Bullfrog, in London. This event will feature Matt Lacey and Mike Ormond, discussing a variety of Windows Phone Development topics.